Video

Federal Tax Treatment of Cryptocurrency

Whether you call it bitcoin, virtual currency, or digital currency it is all the same thing.

At one recent count there was more than a thousand types of cryptocurrencies. The IRS came out in 2014 with it’s a notice on how it was going to tax cryptocurrency. The bottom line of that notice is that it was going to apply general property principles to virtual currency. So, for tax purposes, cryptocurrency is treated as property. The TIGTA Report, released in September 2016, criticized the IRS for failing to develop a coordinated virtual currency strategy since issuing their Notice 2014-21. This video reviews the IRS response to the TIGTA Report as well as the digital currency tax compliance gap.